the hope of stimulating greater French participation in trade with
China.
The importance of Chinese nationalism for Vietnam lay not so
much in the effect it had on Chinese living there (as in Malaya and
Indonesia), but on the revolutionary model it provided for Vietnamese
nationalism—revolutionary because the French authorities banned all
political activity outside Cochinchina. At first, after the failure of the
1898 Reform Movement in China, Vietnamese nationalists looked to
Japan for inspiration. The secret ‘Eastern Travel’ society smuggled young
Vietnamese through China to study in Japan, until they were expelled
in 1909 under the terms of a financial agreement with France. With the
success of the 1911 Revolution, China became the preferred model and
the principal refuge for Vietnamese nationalists, and several young Viet-
namese gained entry to Nationalist Chinese military academies.
The success of the GMD in unifying China stimulated the found-
ing, in 1927, of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, known from its
Vietnamese name as the VNQDD. As an illegal political party, the
VNQDD was forced to operate clandestinely. Like the GMD, it was
organised on Leninist democratic centralist lines in small cells, but
was soon infiltrated by the French secret police. In February 1930,
the VNQDD instigated an abortive uprising by Vietnamese troops
stationed at a French military garrison in northern Vietnam. In the
repression that followed, many of its young leaders were arrested and
guillotined; others fled to China. This left the way open for the better
organised Indochina Communist Party (ICP).
The ICP had its roots in the cooperation that existed prior to
1927 between Chinese Nationalists and communists. Among the
Comintern agents sent to Canton at this time was Nguyen Ai Quoc,
better known under his later alias as Ho Chi Minh. For two years, from
mid-1925 to mid-1927, Ho worked closely with members of the
Chinese Communist Party. He then left China, only to return to Hong
Kong in 1930 with the task of unifying disparate Vietnamese commu-
nist organisations to form the ICP.
A Short History of China and Southeast Asia